Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

John Ford | The Grapes of Wrath

what people do

by Douglas Messerli

Nunnally
Johnson (screenplay, based on the novel by John Steinbeck), John Ford
(director) The Grapes of Wrath /
1940

Having
just watched John Ford’s The Grapes of
Wrath again last night, I find myself a bit perplexed at having to describe
the work. Having abandoned most of Steinbeck’s social screed, Nunnally Johnson’s
script pares down the story to make it a kind of depression road movie, as the
Joad family, forced to leave their home, makes its way from Oklahoma to
California, with several stops along the way. As Daniel Eagan writes, the
family seems less like the wave of Okies who made the same trip than innocent
and lonely frontiersmen, which takes the film in a strange direction as the
family seems to become more and more isolated from those around them with whom
they might have joined up in their despair. Only the ex-prisoner Tom (Henry
Fonda) associates with others, and it is he who ultimately leaves the family
fold in an attempt, perhaps, to change society through a longer voyage than the
trip has allowed him. Yet even that somewhat positive ending—as opposed to the
near certain starvation and death facing Steinbeck’s Joads—is so vague that we
have little idea how to interpret his departure. It may be that he has simply
once more gone on the run. Indeed, Fonda’s Tom begins the film as a kind
of loner who in his stoic quietude keeps his family at arm’s length, if only to
protect them from being involved in his past.

One wonders, accordingly, what seems so
appealing with this fairly empty story. Yes, there are the occasional quaint
philosophical-like musings coming primarily from the mouth of the the ex-preacher
Casy (John Carradine):

There ain’t no
sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just

what people do.

And
there is the wonderfully warm and loving performance of the open-hearted
survivor Ma Joad by Jane Darwell. But hardly anyone else in this film gets more
than a few lines. Yet the film does, somehow, stay with one, mostly through
Ford’s, his cinematographer’s, and designer’s images: the preposterous truck
stuffed with family and furniture, the silhouetted shuffle of the family across
the harsh American landscape, the jumble of tar shacks and tumble-down
buildings of the migrant camp. Seeing this film again, I perceived that it is
not so much what Ford and Johnson say
in this work, but what they show, how they let us know what people do. In fact, one might argue that the Joad family is
not represented real folk but as an emblem of an Okie family on the road. And
as such they are not actually allowed to do
much except to move through space, shuffling in and out of camps and, again
like pioneers, scanning the lay of the land. Mostly they simply symbolize Ford’s
sort of sentimentalized notion of “family.”

Ultimately, it is this emblematic quality
that raises the Joad family to the level of the iconic. They are not just a family but every family forced to
leave their home on a journey to a new land. They are not just depression
heroes but share in the voyage of every American emigrant. When they speak, it
is mostly in empty phrases such as “You done what you had to do” or “We was
family.” Only the family outsider, Tom, is allowed to speak of anything
specific, but his words are most often couched in questions rather than
politicized statements: “What is a red anyway?”

It is their iconic quality, accordingly,
that makes the Joads so watchable and memorable. But for the same reasons Ford’s
film represents less a story or even a series of incidents than a sentiment, a
kind of homely and gritty Hallmark card that encourages its audience to mutter:
“There but for the grace of God go I.” Had Rosasharn been permitted by the
writers and censers to open her blouse, pull out her tit, and let an old man
suck, the whole cinematic version would have collapsed in the blush of suddenly
revealed humanity. In the film everything must remain vague for the Norman
Rockwell-like portrait of the film to be maintained.